Business Is Booming For the GPO —Cagle

JUST WHEN you think that Democrats aren’t good for anything but second-guessing Republican leadership in the White House, along comes a Washington Post report that could suggest the Dems are good business for printing.

The Democratic-led Congress has a five-day work week, as opposed to the three days per week logged by its Republican-heavy predecessor. That translates into a greater need for printing by the Government Printing Office (GPO), especially areas such as the Congressional Record, the daily report that averages 250 pages. According to the Post, it helped push the GPO’s annual printing costs an additional $3 million.

Robert Tapella, chief of staff for the GPO, told the paper that the shift in party control created a swell of need for stationery—Democrats in new leadership posts, incumbent Republicans in minority roles, freshman lawmakers. The growth in print has been so great that the GPO requested $110 million to cover congressional printing and binding costs in the next fiscal year, $26 million more than the current budget (though $8 million is needed to cover the agency’s deficit, according to the Post, since the budget was not increased despite increasing print demands and costs for things like wages and paper). The U.S. Code, printed every six years, has to be published in the next fiscal year.

Roughly 92 percent of everything the GPO publishes is available in e-format, the Post reported, and it produced the first online edition of the Record earlier this year.

It’s important for us to get behind the effort that supports maintaining hard copies.

WILL PRINT FOR TUITION: Like many people, I tend to glaze over e-mail when there are 50 or more idling in the old inbox on a Monday morning. It takes precision timing, a catchy subject line and a real sounding company (not Paradigm Integrated Solution Specialists) to make me invest .8 seconds in opening the missive.